Monday, February 28, 2005 9:14 pm

The Lord’s table, that is … she had her first Communion Sunday evening. (We Presbyterians offer Communion to children as young as first grade, although they still don’t become voting members of the church until after the traditional confirmation service, typically around seventh grade or so.)

We’ve been attending her classes together, even though parents weren’t required to attend but a couple, because she was nervous about the whole thing, including the fact that she would be sitting with other children and church elders at dinner, rather than with me. But she paid close attention during the classes and was able to explain the purpose and meaning of the sacrament without any prompting when they were through.

Last night at the dinner before the service, she was seated next to a girl she knew well from choir, and they had a blast; I don’t think she looked at me once the whole time. And she did exactly what she was supposed to do during the service and looked good and behaved well while doing it.

As part of one of their classes, the kids made wine chalices for themselves out of clay, then glazed and fired them (I haven’t done anything with clay since 2nd grade, so I’m not sure of the exact technique). After the service last night, V. insisted that I accept her chalice as a gift, a sign of her appreciation for my having come to all the classes with her.

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Thursday, February 24, 2005 5:51 am

This post at Unfogged is disturbing. The accompanying comments are by people who are disturbed. It’s all hilarious, but, guys, you’re gonna want to go ahead and cross your legs before clicking on the link so as to avoid the rush.

You already know what the first three rules of investigative reporting are.* Rule No. 4? Always read the documents. And either Rule No. 5 or Rule No. 4A is: Always do the math. This is particularly important when writing about taxes and government spending.

The Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson agrees, I’m happy to report: “It’s always necessary to do the math. By this I mean that journalists need to measure politicians’ promises against underlying realities, as represented by numbers.”

So why didn’t he do it?

Our central budget problem, as I’ve noted in earlier columns, is the coming spending explosion in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, driven by aging baby boomers and rising health spending. In 2004 these programs cost $965 billion, or 8.4 percent of the economy (gross domestic product). The Congressional Budget Office projects that by 2030 their costs will rise to 14 percent of GDP, or more than $1.6 trillion in today’s dollars. Avoiding a (nearly) $700 billion annual increase in taxes or deficits would require comparable spending cuts in other government programs. It won’t happen. The projected increase in retirement spending nearly equals all federal “discretionary spending” — a category that includes defense, homeland security, environmental programs, national parks, scientific research and much more. We’re not going to eliminate all these programs.

Once you’ve done this math, you recognize that benefit cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are inevitable. They’re the only other way to limit massive tax increases or immense budget deficits. Moreover, the benefit cuts have to affect baby boomers, because they will be the people on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The critical period occurs from 2011 to 2029, when all baby boomers (people born from 1946 to 1964) hit 65. That’s when budgetary pressures intensify.

Samuelson, although identified here as a political columnist, is an economist, for God’s sake. And yet it somehow has escaped his notice that if we do nothing at all to Social Security — nothing at all, meaning no benefit cuts, no tax increase, no borrowing, and even taking into account the likely need for increases in spending on benefits — it can continue to pay full benefits to 2042, more than a decade later than the “critical period” Samuelson is worrying about.

Medicare and Medicaid are indeed disasters waiting to happen. But the current budget deficits and trade deficits, which he doesn’t even address, are disasters happening right now. Social Security? Pfffft. Yeah, we’ll need to do something eventually. But right now and for the next couple of decades or so, we’ve got much bigger problems. And surely Samuelson is smart enough to know it.

His column comes with the headline “Journalistic malpractice.” Truth in advertising, I guess.

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Monday, February 21, 2005 8:56 pm

I played a lot of pinball in college, no doubt because I spent a disproportionate amount of time at my frat house, whose furniture included a pinball machine, one of the old electromechanical ones on which 25,000 points entitled you to a free game. But after college I didn’t play much until around the fall of 1992, when I wandered into College Hill Sundries and discovered Williams/Bally’s Addams Family pinball machine.

And fell in love.

For starters, I’d loved the Raul Julia/Anjelica Huston movie, from which most of the game’s graphics and sounds were taken. (The game incorporated a number of quotes from the movie, all of which made perfect sense in the context of pinball.) But the machine also entranced me purely as a pinball game: It had a wide variety of targets and a large number of skill levels — it rewarded skill and technique.

Alas, Addams Family eventually was replaced by another machine, and not coincidentally, I haven’t spent much time in College Hill Sundries since. But I’ve dreamed ever since about that pinball machine. In fact, I once told Ann that when my midlife crisis rolled around, if I could find an Addams Family machine in good working order, I’d buy it and just forget about the sports car. I found a few on eBay from time to time, but since the kids have come along the price was a bit out of my reach.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when I got a new computer and was first exposed to the “Space Cadet” pinball game built into Windows 2000 and XP. (I’ve worked on W2K at work for quite a while, but our systems folks’ installs omit the games. I wonder why.) As a pinball game, it’s not all that, but as a computer simulation of a pinball game I found it excellent, quite realistic. (There are even keys you can type to give the machine a little left, right or forward body English, although not one for a 3-foot air drop, which the machine in my frat house underwent from time to time.)

And that’s when it hit me: If they could make a computer simulation of a generic pinball game, maybe they could make one of Addams Family.

Maybe they already had.

As it happened, I did a feature on pinball for the paper back in 1993 and spoke then with a flack for the parent company of Williams/Bally, himself a pinball freak. So I knew somebody in the bidness. I resolved to call this guy and find out if the company had licensed computer versions of its pinball games (and if not, give them the idea for free).

Unfortunately, the parent company shut down its pinball business in 1999, the better to concentrate on its more profitable casino-gaming business. (When I wrote about pinball in ’93, the industry was enjoying a resurgence, but apparently computer/video games won out, as I had suspected they would.)

But this quest ain’t over. Somebody still has rights to the game. And if I can find that somebody, maybe I can interest them in a computer version of Addams Family (and, for that matter, the entire Williams/Bally catalog, which can’t be doing the rights holder much good at the moment otherwise).

“Don’t torture yourself,” Morticia Addams would say. But who says I can’t take it with me? The last ball hasn’t drained yet, so I’m going to keep flipping.

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I’m not awake enough yet to be able to say anything coherent about this.

UPDATE: Like a lot of people, I first read “Hell’s Angels” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” when I was at an impressionable age — in my case, ninth grade, where my lab partner pressed them upon me (thanks, Julie!).

Unlike a lot of people, I don’t worship the ground Thompson walked on. His early work was full of the sexism that underlay a lot of the free-love generation’s ethos (Ginmar, newly returned from Iraq — welcome back, Ginmar! — has more to say on this), and his later work was pretty repetitive.

One of my favorite pieces was his take on the Pulitzer divorce case, which I recall reading in Rolling Stone. It had many admirable qualities, but I particularly remember two: his incisive description of Roxanne Pulitzer as “a woman who clearly liked to sleep late” (I think that is a direct quote) and his observation about servants: They will be the downfall of the wealthy because it’s hard to find one who’s smart enough to make the beds but not smart enough to wonder why they’re full of naked people every morning. (There are days, however, when I think such servants probably could be recruited in bulk from the White House press corps, and no, that’s not a Jeff Gannon joke.)

But if Thompson is remembered for nothing else, he’ll be remembered for his portrayal of Richard M. Nixon. The worst in Nixon brought out the best in Thompson, both in terms of his outrage and in terms of his love and devotion, never far below the surface no matter how cynical he acted, for the best that this country can represent. No one, not even Nixon’s friends and relatives, got Nixon the way Thompson did, and I suspect students of American history and politics will read Thompson’s work for as long as the field survives.

That said, I am horrified that he chose to commit suicide in such a messy way, leaving his wife and son to deal with the physical and psychic mess. I’ve learned not to judge people with suicidal tendencies too harshly — they’re sick by definition except, perhaps, for those facing painful, terminal illness — but his decision is, at best, horrible. It is not “fitting.” It is not romantic. In effect if not in intent, it is a permanent brutalization of those closest to him, and it will stain his legacy.

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Sunday, February 20, 2005 5:38 pm

… I can talk publicly about what we’ve known officially since December and personally for a long time before that: Susan Ladd is one hell of an editor. But even better than that, she’s a loyal and devoted friend. And, of course, she and her husband, Herb Everett, get it.

Tuesday, February 15, 2005 6:01 am

The Edge Foundation asked a bunch of smart people, “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” David Buss, a psychologist at the University of Texas, responded:

True love.I’ve spent two decades of my professional life studying human mating. In that time, I’ve documented phenomena ranging from what men and women desire in a mate to the most diabolical forms of sexual treachery. I’ve discovered the astonishingly creative ways in which men and women deceive and manipulate each other. I’ve studied mate poachers, obsessed stalkers, sexual predators, and spouse murderers. But throughout this exploration of the dark dimensions of human mating, I’ve remained unwavering in my belief in true love.

While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are fortunate enough to experience it. The roads of regular love are well traveled and their markers are well understood by many-the mesmerizing attraction, the ideational obsession, the sexual afterglow, profound self-sacrifice, and the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own course through uncharted territory. It knows no fences, has no barriers or boundaries. It’s difficult to define, eludes modern measurement, and seems scientifically wooly. But I know true love exists. I just can’t prove it.

OK, that’s it for sappy romanticism. We now return you to your previously scheduled snark ‘n’ outrage.

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Tuesday, February 8, 2005 6:05 am

Ann has given me a wonderful early Valentine’s present: We’re going to buy a digital camera.

That’s the good news, and it is very good news indeed. The bad news is the question I face: What the heck do I do now?

Up to now I have shot all our pictures on a Nikon FG20 that probably was 20 years old when Ann gave it to me for Christmas 15 years ago. With a 35-85 macro zoom lens, it gives me some breathtaking closeups of the kids along with decent but not spectacular long shots. But it’s manual everything, and when you’re shooting kids sometimes you only get one quick chance to get the right shot, so we’re upgrading.

And unlike computer specs, on which I can recite chapter and verse, having just bought a new one, I know zipall about digital cameras. So:

What specs ought I to be looking for? What are the must-have features and what are the features that, although cool, can be forgone by someone on a budget? Are still captures from digital video of high enough quality that we should just get a digital video camera and forget about a still camera?

All help greatly appreciated, and now that I have a Flickr account, I hope to be presenting the fruits of your suggestions to you here shortly.

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Saturday, February 5, 2005 10:14 pm

Victoria came to me in tears last night. I asked her what was wrong, and this is what she said:

“Granny brought me a new dress, and I don’t like it but I can’t tell her that because I don’t want to hurt her feelings and I don’t know what to do. It’s so frustrating, Daddy — I don’t know where my path is trying to lead me. I don’t know what God wants me to do.”

Wednesday, February 2, 2005 9:46 pm

Just in case you were laboring under the delusion that things here at Chez Blog on the Run hum along like a well-oiled machine, be advised, particularly if you’re a real-life friend or relative, that our first batch of Christmas cards went out … um, tomorrow.

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TO: Anyone who is, in any way, involved in the culinary arts, or the creation, production, archiving and/or distribution of any works of print or electronic media pertaining thereunto.FROM: LexDATE: 2/2/05RE: Carrot cake